Embarrassment Rock

Nitsuh Abebe defends the much-maligned notion of "rockism" and discusses the difficulty of articulating a love of rock music proper when the language used to describe it has been tainted and corrupted.

Most anyone who's habitually spent time reading about music during the last decade will have encountered, somewhere and somehow, the notion of "rockism." I'm assuming that group includes the both of us, for better or worse. But if not: One simple way to define rockism would be to say it's just a variety of closed-mindedness. A rockist is a person who's comfortable with the way rock works, values the stuff rock values, and gets all hostile or dismissive toward all the wonderful music in the world that happens to work some other way. Being a rockist is, pretty much by definition, a bad thing; predictably enough, it's hard to come up with arguments for why being closed-minded is actually noble and admirable.

Granted, simple definitions aren't really what the word "rockism" is built for. It's built for arguments-- complex and sometimes immensely tedious arguments-- and boy howdy did some of us spend the early years of the millennium poring over the nuances of the stuff. I personally hit rock bottom when I found myself in an idiotic debate with the shoe-rental guy at a bowling alley in Chicago, a man who was going on at length about the general decline of pop music from a peak of sophistication (in his eyes, Steely Dan) to a soulless hell where all anyone does is just "push a button." (In his eyes, that was 80s synth-popper Howard Jones. Note that this was, like, 2002, and I'd been drinking, and Howard Jones and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen literally play the exact same instrument, a row of elongated buttons called a "keyboard," so please forgive me an ill-advised 90-second "what are you talking about" with this guy-- I'm not normally that annoying.) By 2004, there was even a much-admired Kelefa Sanneh piece on rockism in The New York Times-- one of very few instances in which I've seen a general audience confronted with a totally abstract egghead debate concerning the inner workings of musical taste.

One of the more subtle casualties of rockism is the ability to articulate what's actually good about a piece of rock music.

There were a lot of reasons the topic seemed especially resonant back then, technology chief among them: Once you've got a 32-gig iPod and some file-sharing software, being closed-minded ceases to be much use. There was also, amusingly, the ongoing rise of the comment. The comments under a newspaper article about music, a blog post, a video, whatever-- they could turn up the most amazing rockists! Paleo-rockists, caricatures of rockists, grotesques of rockists, a thousand times worse than what any music nerd was imagining when they used the word as an insult. The one fact about music these types had firmly lodged in their minds was that the person who sang Britney Spears songs was not the same person who wrote them, and that this was one of the top 10 worst things that had ever happened on the North American continent. Pop was a glitzy con; rap wasn't even music; nobody played "real" instruments; everything had been all downhill since Zeppelin, or the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana. You heard this from people of all ages. Most of them seemed to have gone through life seeing themselves as alone, special, and superior-- the select few who could spot real talent while everyone else was fooled by mediocrity and fraud. Once Americans really took to typing opinions online, though, there were days when this began to look more like a silent, depressing plurality. As if rockism-- a term defined from the get-go as a sort of embarrassing disorder-- didn't look terrible enough already! Now it had bogeymen, too.

Oh, well. Conversation about the word was receding anyway; the arguments had all been gone over enough times and they tended to get overwrought very quickly. They'd also accomplished what they needed to: conducting a massive awareness and sensitivity campaign that left many people keenly aware of when they were about to say something silly, regressive, or predictable. Rockism's grand problems had become official. At its best, it made you a little hard to talk to. At its worst, it made you deaf, weirdly oblivious to what was happening in most of the music around you.

Not to mention mute. One of the more subtle casualties of rockism is the ability to articulate what's actually good about a piece of rock music. So when a few exciting new rock bands come around the corner, like they did 10 years ago, they're immediately bathed in clichés: This is what rock'n'roll is all about! Now that's real rock'n'roll attitude! Rock is back! These guys are its saviors! And so on until the end of time. You could spend 24 hours straight reading praise for the White Stripes without ever coming across much talk about what made them valuable-- just appeals to the existence of rock itself. The idea is always that rock is self-evidently good and true, in ways we all understand and value highly and would probably be a little bit embarrassed to try and explain to one another (explaining rock'n'roll is totally not rock'n'roll, right?), and so all that is really needed is to identify it: Here it is, firing on all cylinders, valiantly trouncing everything in its path. The weirdest aspect of this muteness was that you'd consistently see rock bands praised in the negative: At least they're not Britney Spears (who, recall the tragedy, isn't a composer), at least they're not dance music, at least they're not hip-hop, at least they're not pop. But, you know... what are they, specifically?

Rockism is pretty useless as a totalizing way of looking at the world, a fixed viewpoint you use to think about music as a whole. But what about the possibility that it also works as a sort of... passing urge?

And you'd figure that the more people grew hyper-aware of this-- the more rockist standards became embarrassing and passé, the more people were forcibly debated into noticing that they could be conservative and closed-off and, at times, sort of sexually and racially iffy-- the better that would be for the way we talk about rock music, because now we'd have to actually explain what we were feeling.

But this has not necessarily been the case.

Lately I keep wondering why. I'm starting to think part of the issue is that rockism-- or at least something that closely resembles it-- does turn out to be defensible. Don't get me wrong: It's clearly pretty useless as a totalizing way of looking at the world, a fixed viewpoint you use to think about music as a whole. But what about the possibility that it also works as a sort of... passing urge? I mean, if there's music out there that magically thrills the soul of the rockist, that creates actual pleasure in the gut of this horrible stinky villain, then it stands to reason that there's a hole-- however small or particular or unadaptable to different-shaped pegs-- somewhere in that rockist's heart. And if that hunger exists, then certain pieces of music can be brilliant at sating it. This is true of every musical genre, I think. You grow to like a sound, and the basic dimensions of it-- the fundamental, generic way it works-- teach you something new to hunger for. A hunger that will, in most cases, be satisfied only by that one sound.

Sure, the hunger can be rigorously closed-minded. There are afternoons where all I want to hear is the implacable beat of extremely straightforward techno, and the thought of any other music seems pitiful in comparison. There are also afternoons when I want techno to keep the hell away from me while I listen to someone warble quietly along with a harp. Maybe I'm just way too malleable, but none of these impulses seem to have anything grand or overarching to say about the world. It's just that when I'm really enjoying a rock band, I tend to feel like every other kind of music is nice but basically secondary; and when I'm really enjoying a rapper, rock suddenly seems comical and self-serious; and when I'm going through another period of trying to understand more jazz, 90 percent of my record collection seems as if it were made for children. Maybe you're the same way? It's closed-minded, but in turns, which I like to think eventually adds up to being open-minded. And it's that brief purist impulse-- the sense of an itch that only one thing can scratch-- that lets you enjoy the music.

There are certain types of music that you can have that itchy purism about without catching too much flak over it-- say, roots reggae, classic bebop, or black metal. There are others where the world will, quite rightly, try to shame you into being less dull-- say, if you're always stubbornly devoted to 60s soul, or golden-age hip-hop, as if the world hasn't kept spinning since then. And, of course, there's rock. The language used to describe rock's itch has been tainted, corrupted, and used as a silly weapon for so long that it's become faintly embarrassing.

Recently, some of the albums that have excited me most have aimed to scratch that itch. One of them, Cloud Nothings' Attack on Memory, seems awfully purposeful about it. Dylan Baldi, having spent his late teenage years yelping over home-recorded pop-punk, wrote songs that wanted to spread out into something richer, more physical, more serious. He brought his touring band into Steve Albini's studio, a place that's more or less totemic for people interested in rich, visceral indie-rock. He included long, seething instrumental jams, and shifted his vocal delivery away from adolescent snottiness and toward raw, ragged, and weighty. Start listing these things as a form of praise, and a voice might pipe up in the back of your head: Is this not just a weird list of rockist bona fides? Is this the right way to be rhapsodizing about this music? And yet all of those things do seem critical to what the album does well: It captures exactly the kinds of raw frustration and defeatist anxiety this sort of indie rock excels at conveying. (It doesn't hurt that Baldi, try as he might to steer away from it, cannot stop writing pop hooks.)

Or take a pair of bands on the Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. Pop. 1280 shoot for a grim noir sound, all steady pounding and wailing-- and they do it with an unwavering zeal that's sort of lovable, especially if you're not trying to take them too seriously. Their labelmates the Men are more agile, crashing around between blustery punk, noise, and psychedelics-- but they're also after a very physical kind of energy, one where you can hear motion and strain, muscle and chaos, through your speakers. In both cases, there's something refreshing about the sound: a sense that they're scratching an itch some of us might have neglected lately. It's funny, though; in a few corners of the world, the words that usually describe that itch still feel vaguely suspect, subjected to enough years of scrutiny that they beg for replacement. They appeal to tired narratives, or they're too masculine, or the people who use them are too often jerks about it.

Pity the poor rock fan? Well, no: Rock fans have launched enough snobby, pernicious bits of language at other genres that they could afford to do some penance resurrecting their own. And the oldest, most tattered narratives of rock music are still going strong. I don't know if you caught last week's Grammys, but they managed to float through the air, winding between all the pop-star performances, spilling over into the "60 Minutes" special beforehand. Adele was lauded not just for being great at what she does, but for being "real" and authentic and not wearing the kinds of clothes Rihanna or Katy Perry might. Bon Iver, accepting the award for Best New Artist, made what seemed like an earnest, well-meaning attempt to acknowledge that there are whole worlds of music that fall outside the Grammys' view-- but, this being neither the time nor the place nor the speaker to stress that, he merely came off a bit snobby and self-serious. Dave Grohl was everywhere, as if he represented the last gasp of the entire category of rock music, and needed our support; in the end, he traded guitar solos with Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Joe Walsh, as if someone were being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No wonder we need to get inventive when we talk about rock.